The Obligatory Long Poem About a Greek Legend

Who'd be Achilles? Were not all

the women, except Clytemnestra,

more likable? Ill fates befall

them, true, but surely even extra

ill fate awaits the son of Thetis

in the Greek underworld where ill he's

done will beset him, long as it is.

Who'd ever want to play Achilles?

Apprenticed to physician, he

was offered private life, long, happy,

or short life, long in memory.

"Short life with glory," chose our chappie.

But even so, this gay young colt

hid himself in amongst the fillies

when from the battle he did bolt.

Who'd ever want to play Achilles?

As boy who could pass for a girl

Achilles was the chosen lover

who set Patroclus' heart awhirl,

but, during years spent undercover,

crawled under covers with a maid.

They had two children; but the sillies

let her name from the records fade.

Who'd ever want to play Achilles?

When that first war at last had ended,

Achilles must have been quite a sight

as maiden; muscular and splendid,

he'd give a man both fright and fight.

His parents gave him fifty ships

with fifty soldiers each. To kill he's

ready at last; his troops equips--

Who'd ever want to play Achilles?

But long before his ships reach Troy

some of them wash up on the coast.

Town's army come to attack our boy.

Achilles wounds the chief his host

before misunderstanding's smoothed.

Oracle says he'll cure the ill he's

done. He'll not. Odysseus has soothed--

Who'd ever want to play Achilles?

The wound Achilles gave the chief.

Then they sail on. The men soon grumble.

To quiet them, our boy turns thief,

sacks cities where no gang sought rumble,

takes noble Chryseis as sex slave

even though trying to force his will he's

caught with Prince Troilus, none can save.

Who'd ever want to play Achilles?

Some say Chryseis was a queen;

more say a girl with golden hair.

The richest ransom they'd ever seen

her father brings to reclaim her care.

King Agamemnon, born accurst,

surely gives such a girl the willies;

of her abusers, might not be worst.

Who'd ever want to play Achilles?

Briseis, noble though not royal,

spends the nights in Achilles' tent,

though that was not enough to spoil

his lust for Troilus. When he sent

for Chryseis, to return for ransom,

great love for her's claimed by Achilles.

Later he favors Ag, the handsome.

Who'd ever want to play Achilles?

Nevertheless they're only women.

Chryseis for Briseis once traded,

Achilles sulks, his ships' sails trimming,

lust for fair fights (if any) faded.

He loved Briseis more than life!

He orders faithful silly-billies:

Turn back to his own home and wife.

Who'd ever want to play Achilles?

The war is going against the Greeks!

Odysseus sends to Achilles' truelove,

through all these years and months and weeks

while he's been bedding every new "love":

Patroclus, faithful as a dog:

Can anything cure the ill will he's

wallowing in like a bloated hog?

Who'd ever want to play Achilles?

"I'm off to war," Patroclus says.

"We promised we would fight; let's do it."

Achilles clings to his sulking ways.

Patroclus goes to Troy, falls to it.

He's not too old to go out fighting.

Doing what he's come to do--to kill--he's

felled at last, though tough as a Titan.

Who'd ever want to play Achilles?

Some say we know good things when they're past.

Word that he's lost Patroclus forever

stirs up Achilles to fight at last.

Cowardly yet still strong and clever,

he kills the river-god who complains

entire troops of slaughtered ghillies

choke river bed and block the plains.

Who'd ever want to play Achilles?

Was he impervious to injuries,

or had he learned a way to heal them?

Though he was trained as healer, he's

portrayed as if he just didn't feel them.

Was it heart, liver, or lung, or heel

the arrow struck at the final kill? He's

never a healer, always a heel.

Who'd ever want to play Achilles?

Dante said he saw him down in Hell,

bound in the Circle of Lust forever.

Shakespeare said he didn't fare so well,

claiming a victory while he never

fought, even in the final battle,

but chose another boy to fill his

bed, and would kill him should he tattle.

Who'd ever want to play Achilles?

Socrates said that between two liars,

Odysseus is Achilles' better

because his knowing the truth inspires

him to unleash lies without fetter--

Say what?--What an odd Greek idea!

Apollodorus gives final thrill: he's

seen Achilles in Hell, bound to Medea!

Who'd ever want to play Achilles?

To be fair, most of the sources Robert Graves consulted did say some good things about Achilles, other than that he fought hard and dirty when he ran out of excuses. But not many, and I've never found them very convincing. Many men and women, on both sides, are portrayed as heroic in the Iliad. Achilles is portrayed as, at the very best, a spoiled brat; more often a monster of selfishness, lust, and violence.

It used to be obligatory for all writers to write things that showed that they'd read ancient Greek literature, if only in translations. A simplified, heavily censored, age-appropriate version of Graves' Greek Myths was given to my classmates and me in grade eight; I found the real book in the school library; it was my first real study of "adult" themes of vengeance and perversion, and, as such, not a favorite book but one that fascinated me. I still don't like ancient Greek literature because of the bizarre moral sense, the misogyny, and the preposterous claim that those savages in ancient Greece were the only people "civilized" enough to be "really human." I have, however, read some of it--beyond Graves.

For those who haven't, the unexplained characters in this poem are:

1. Clytemnestra: Married to King Agamemnon, who led a different army to the same war with Achilles, leaving one of his cousins to guard the palace and her. Clytemnestra might, some think, not have turned against her husband until she heard that he'd sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia as a burnt offering. Then she seduced her husband's cousin, offering to help make him king in Agamemnon's stead. When Agamemnon came home they prepared a nice bath to rest his weary feet, and when he was naked and relaxed they burst in and murdered him. Some say Clytemnestra was excused for this, in ancient Greek thinking, because she had to avenge her daughter.

2. Thetis: She was described as a nymph rather than a goddess, but as having Olympian "blood." Some say it was her refusal to have sex with Zeus or Apollo, while living with a human man as his wife, that kept her from being taken to Mount Olympus herself. The Iliad says she dipped the infant Achilles in the river Styx to give him invulnerability; other sources say it was fire. When Achilles was sulking in his tent and praying for Troy to win the war, he was praying to Thetis.

3. Agamemnon, himself: He hoped, by valor in battle, to atone for some part of the curse on his family that was believed to have been incurred by his father and uncle having had a sort of competition to see who could do more of the things ancient Greeks considered immoral. He was a good soldier who killed his share of Trojans. Some even claim that he might not have raped Chryseis or Briseis, though this is hard to believe. Most enslaved Greek women worked in homes or on farms and were supervised by the lady of the house, but the ones taken in war had no female supervisors or companions and no legitimate housework to do; if not being held for ransom they were sex slaves. Some claim he boasted about owning Chryseis and preferring her to his rightful wife. Everyone agrees that he raped Cassandra. In ancient Greek thinking that wasn't considered to be why he deserved what he got; rather, he deserved what he got simply because he was a son of Atreus. It was Atreus, not Agamemnon, who killed two infant sons of Agamemnon's uncle Thyestes and served them to Thyestes as roast pork. (Eating human flesh, especially of a relative, was believed to incur a lifelong curse; cannibals could atone only by dying.)

4. Troilus: A prince of Troy, but he was killed while visiting a Greek city in the company of Tenes, a son of Apollo. Sources differ only on whether Achilles murdered Troilus before or in the process of raping him. The crime occurred in the temple of Apollo. Where Tenes was at the time is not recorded. In ancient Greek thinking this made Achilles merely an "over-enthusiastic lover" and was never mentioned as a cause of the Trojan War. Some, however, say Achilles then fell in love with Troilus's sister Polyxena, because she looked like him, and demanded Polyxena in marriage after killing (or having his troops kill) their father in battle. Others say he demanded her as a bride for his son. There is some dispute about whether Polyxena participated in the killing of Achilles and then committed suicide, or demanded that the Greeks kill her as a princess rather than taking her home as a slave. Anyway she didn't survive.

5. Medea: She came in another story, supposed to have happened earlier. On learning that her husband had cheated on her she killed her own babies and served them to her husband as stew. Apollodorus thought she was the sort of partner-for-afterlife Achilles--why not Atreus?--deserved. In ancient Greek thinking what Medea did was wrong, but only to be expected, since most women were neither moral nor intelligent. 

The mother of Achilles' children may have been just one of seven princesses and their slaves, or more than one; her or their names were given as Deidamia, Iphigenia, or Pyrrha. Some say Pyrrha ("redhead") was just a nickname for Deidamia, Iphigenia was an error, and Achilles and Deidamia were married legally, though secretly. Some say Pyrrha was what Achilles was called when disguised as a girl; some say he was called Cercysera or Aissa. Some say that Iphigenia was the mother of the children and Deidamia adopted them when Iphigenia was killed.

The Titans were legendary giants from the past. The ancient Greeks were not exactly midgets--going by skeletal remains, the average height was about 5'6-8" for men, 5'2-3" for women, which put them well ahead of the ancient Egyptians and probably the ancient Israelites--but they wrote as if they all wished they were taller, the way they believed their gods and ancestors were. The "giants" in their legendary past might have been 6' tall, like Greeks who grew up on a modern high-protein diet today. According to Wikipedia one skeleton said to have been a "very tall" man would have been 5'10". 

The river-god's name was Scamander. One of the princes of Troy was called Scamandrus. So who knows.

Finally, although Cassandra is not really part of Achilles' story, she's certainly part of the Iliad. She was said to have red-blonde hair, grey eyes, and a "mannish figure" in youth, though motherhood filled out her figure. In the Iliad she has a juicy part a good actress could interpret in several ways, with plenty of nuance. Why Ellen/Elliot Page didn't want to play her, rather than Achilles...well...playing Cassandra would require acting talent, at least to choose a way to play the role and stick to it. Playing Achilles merely requires a person to act like a spoiled brat, and/or liar, coward, traitor, thief, and pedophile depending on how much time on stage Achilles gets.

And such were the foundations of our civilization...but without the Jewish, indigenous American, and Engllish Quaker foundations as well, our civilization would never have come as far as it has done.

Movie/Book Review: Ten Things I Hate

Reclaimed from Blogjob. Some people did like the movie Ten Things I Hate About You. My immediate reaction, the night my husband and I watched it, was to write a list of the ten things we most hated about it.  That list was slightly revised and updated into the Blogjob post, which has been re-revised and updated here:

Years ago, a Blockbuster Evening inspired me, the next morning, to list ten things to hate about this low-budget remake of The Taming of the Shrew. Why waste a review? Those who remember Ten Things I Hate About You may at least get a chuckle out of this list of ten things to hate about Ten Things I Hate About You.

The book was written by David Levithan. I didn’t buy it, but in the unlikely event that this review makes anyone want a copy of it I could get it from Amazon.

1. There’s more than one male character in Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew. There’s also more than one male character in Ten Things I Hate About You, but, since all the teenaged male actors except the star look, talk, and act alike, we have to see them as a crowd to be sure.

2. There are only two substantial female characters in The Taming of the Shrew. To round out the cast, two girl characters have been added to Ten Things I Hate About You. Katerina gets a best friend who is nice but stupid, just like Bianca. Bianca, here played as even a dimmer bulb than Shakespeare made her, gets a worst friend whose wattage is almost low enough to excuse her nastiness, but not quite. So, there are three kinds of teenaged girls: dumb, mean, or both. Even in a farce, teenaged girls deserve more options than this.

3. All the older characters in The Taming of the Shrew are stupid clowns, but by and large the young characters are polite enough to ignore this fact. (There are exceptions.) Mostly it’s the audience who get to laugh out loud. In Ten Things I Hate About You, this instructive bit of social commentary disappears. There’s no pretense of courtesy or even civility toward the older generation. The teenagers use up all the laughter at the adults, and leave very little for any adult viewer to enjoy.

4. In The Taming of the Shrew, no explanation is given for Katerina’s character. She’s a foul-mouthed, bad-tempered, spoilt brat who beats her sister up just because she can. I've known real people like that, and think Shakespeare's play did a good job of showing what can be done about these people if they live to grow up outside of prison. In Ten Things I Hate About You, Kat becomes human, but wimpy: she’s depressed because she’s a rape victim. Recently. Shakespeare’s Katerina would have clobbered anybody who laid an unauthorized finger on her.

5. The movie looks consistently weird. The Taming of the Shrew is supposed to take place in Italy . All the characters are Italian. Although Ten Things I Hate About You is set in the United States, all the actors look Italian-American, except for Katerina and Bianca (who look Swedish-American) and Petruchio, here “Patrick Verona” (who looks Irish-American), and Bianca’s worst friend Chastity and one of the teachers, who are African-American. There might be legitimate reasons for characters having either Italian names or Italian faces but not both, and there might be casts of actors gifted enough to overcome this dissonant effect if they had to work around it; unfortunately, neither of these possibilities is fully realized in Ten Things I Hate About You.

6. The names and stage business allotted to Bianca and Chastity would be a cute reminder of Cher and Dionne in Clueless if they were the only reference to Clueless in Ten Things I Hate About You. Unfortunately, this is not the case. The second-rate remake refers to the brilliant remake constantly…to the extent that my husband, who hadn’t watched or read Clueless, had no idea where the verbal, non-slapstick comedy was found (or why I was laughing).

7. The Taming of the Shrew is a farce with no pretensions to redeeming social value or positive role models, though underneath the slapstick comedy the basic idea of how to help Katerina act like a normal adult with some empathy for other people can actually work. Ten Things I Hate About You is a farce with delusions of redeeming social value (the “statement” that rape victims are often depressed) and delusions of positive role models (who constantly insult all the older people they know and wreck their property). These delusions are an insult to the audience. 

8. The Taming of the Shrew has a plot that suggests, but does not require us to watch, scenes of gross violence or major property destruction. Everybody wants to marry Bianca, nobody wants to marry Katerina, local property transfer rules don't allow anybody to marry Bianca until some poor man has married Katerina, and Katerina refuses to marry anybody. While Petruchio undertakes, on a bet, to marry Katerina, Lucentio sneaks in and marries Bianca. Petruchio avoids fights with Katerina by abusing everyone else, ripping up new clothes, throwing food on the floor, and generally being a bigger jerk than she is. This spoils Katerina’s attempts to get her way by abusing weaker people and forces her to learn an unconvincing submissive act, which, in her case, is an improvement. Although Lucentio and Bianca are in love, they soon run into problems; Petruchio and Katerina, neither of whom knows anything about love, come to terms that allow them to live together.

In Ten Things I Hate About You, virtually all of this plot disappears behind the violence, property destruction, and general misbehavior. Bianca’s date–one of the generic Italian-looking boys–mistreats her, Chastity turns on her, it’s her turn to get depressed, and there’s also a brawl. Neither Bianca nor any of the male supporting characters gets an adventure of his or her own. Bianca doesn’t even end up with a date for the prom.

9. The Taming of the Shrew was, as noted above, about Italians. There was no obvious reason to bring African-American characters into Ten Things I Hate About You. (Black actors could just have been there, unexplained--y'know, people sailed around the Mediterranean coast then, too--as in real Renaissance Italy.) Assuming that the director just happened to know a couple of African-American actors who were about as talented as the rest of the cast, one might have expected that at least one of the two would get a decent part; say, Kat’s dull but supportive buddy. One would be wrong. The Black man plays a burnt-out, stressed-out, hopelessly incompetent teacher who turns every scene into a stereotyped racist-sexist rant. The girl is cast as tacky, two-faced Chastity. Right. This is a stupid, obnoxious, tacky, racist movie that misrepresents White American consciousness to an insulting degree, and as a legally White American I find it deeply offensive.

10. After viewing Ten Things I Hate About You, we went on to view a violent action-adventure movie about Ku Klux Klan idiots, in which fake blood and blank cartridges were extravagantly used. That videotape contained a money-back guarantee: any convincing portrayal of a bigot is inherently offensive but if, after watching the whole movie, viewers found the movie offensive, they could write to the producers and get their money back. That movie did not make me want to complain and get the money back. It wasn’t in either of my preferred movie genres—lighthearted comedies, and sweet family stories filmed in scenes of scenic beauty—but it didn’t offend me. Ten Things I Hate About You did.

Need the snarkiness stop here? Why? A Buzzfeed writer found ten plot details to hate about Ten Things I Hate About You but, since she apparently enjoyed the movie, she used them to construct the plot for a sequel. Somewhere, somebody may actually make this movie.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/kayleeewalsh/10-things-i-hate-about-10-things-i-hate-about-you-rwff#.snZE3ez2N

And here, courtesy of Thesuccess at Morguefile, is a movie-watching cat: www.morguefile.com/archive/display/944775/

Blogjob tags were "Shakespeare, comedy." 

Historical Personages to Read About

The prompt at LongAndShortReviews asked for a "favorite historical personage to read about." 

Do I have to pick just one?

I like diaries, memoirs, and biographies. I particularly like reading the biographies other people wrote about the authors of good diaries and memoirs. 

I remember going through a real Helen Keller "reading phase" in middle school just because so many editions of her first book, plus other people's books about her and Anne Sullivan, came out around that time. Then there were Laura Ingalls Wilder, Louisa May Alcott, Anne Frank, C.S. Lewis, Sylvia Plath, and by that time I was in college and didn't schedule enough free reading time to devour everything by and about a particular writer any more. I still enjoy comparing what people wrote about their own inward experience and what other people wrote about their more outward lives, though. 

There are people who wrote a great deal about their work and wrote very little about their personal lives. I like that about them. They knew that their thoughts on art or science or politics were more valuable to humankind than their personal lives were. Books by Martin Luther or John James Audubon or Thomas Jefferson are very different from books about them. Nevertheless, when somebody like Albert Einstein wrote a book that was all about mathematics, phsyics, and politics with never a chapter about the writer as an individual, that also was a statement about the writer as an individual. 

At the moment, while and because I've been reading about butterflies, I'm feeling interested in the old naturalists like Linnaeus; this week I've found James Duncan's Foreign Butterflies, and I'd be interested in reading more about him. 

But, "favorite"? My favorites come and go depending largely on what I've found about them. The historical personage I admire most is Jesus of Nazareth. No one else comes close. Many people have, however, had interesting lives, and my favorite this week may be Alexander, because I have a good book about him for sale. Next week it might be Harriet Tubman, or Lillian Moller Gilbreth, or my sense of "favorite" might go all the way back to Helen Keller. 

Book Review: The Prose Reader

Title: The Prose Reader

Author: Kim & Michael Flachmann

Publisher: Prentice-Hall

Date: 1999

ISBN: 0-13-095406-3

Length: 688 pages

Quote: “The essays in the Prose Reader continue to represent a wide range of topics.”

That’s what’s not to like about this book. Compared with other essay collections, it’s both thin and tinny. In a frantic effort to be “inclusive” the editors have weighed this book down with essays more than half of which are about the Politics of Identity. Though it would not have been possible for any collection of essays in the 1990s to have any credibility if it didn’t include any of Shelby Steele’s, and thus the essays about the Politics of Identity don’t all add up to “Feel guilty about people like me and throw money at us, which, of course, will make it very hard for you to like or respect any of us, but we don’t care because we only want your money.” But they come close. This book is p.c. to the point of pain.

That still leaves room for some good essays. A few were even written before p.c.-ism had fettered the Muses in America. There’s an essay by Ray Bradbury on putting up a front-porch swing, one by Russell Baker about being a “news boy,” Jessica Mitford’s exposé about the mortuary business, Judith Viorst’s plausible (but wrong) defense of “little white lies,” and Annie Dillard’s reflections on meeting a weasel in the woods. There is, of course, the “controversial” piece in which Shelby Steele dares once again to admit that many Black Americans have earned their own money, and would rather be respected, and perhaps even liked, than have guilt money pushed at them.

Then there’s page after page after page of recent p.c. drivel, and any college student who can find The Best American Essays in the school library will know just how many better essays were not included in this book in order to make sure they were exposed to the arguments for censorship and all the literary grandchildren of Countee Cullen who narrate one personal story and set it up as a plea on behalf of a demographic group. Cullen’s poem (another little kid called him a racist name, and “I saw the town of Baltimore from June until September; Of all the time that I was there, that’s all that I remember”) was terse and memorable, even if some critics found it whiny, but now efforts to be “inclusive” are filling libraries and school textbooks with imitations of it in prose, and some of them would be long even if there weren’t so many of them.

I’ll say this as a woman. Though not a minority group in real life, we’ve been artificially treated like one in the professions, oppressed as badly as any and more than some. The documents of our struggle ought to be in every public library, as well as the academic ones. We ought to remember the names of our activist foremothers, and, whether or not we agree with them on all points, appreciate their contribution to whatever success we’ve enjoyed. (And it behooves all humans who feel in any way discriminated against to read the history of the early Christian Church and the history of the Black American civil rights movement.) But a person whose best, most interesting statement is a statement to the effect that person belongs to a demographic group—are you serious?—is by definition an uninteresting person.

Women writers have had some advantages other “outsider” writers might not have had, in getting our work recognized at all. One reflection of our success is the fact that the Flachmanns’ selection of exemplary essays by women includes more essays about something other than “I Am A [insert demographic group]: This Is How You Are Supposed To Feel About Me” than their selections of exemplary essays from any other demographic. Three! Count them! Three whole essays about things women have learned and thought about something beyond themselves! Hurrah for us!

Except that, actually, people from other demographic groups have written well about topics beyond themselves, and the Flachmanns just haven’t bothered to discover their essays. Which says something about them, I’m sorry to say. When you are doing a computer search for “best essays by [demographic group] authors” you’re likely to find more of the “me-me-me-and-my-demographic-identity” than of the essays people actually write for their own demographic group. Arguably it may be asking too much of college students to expect them to read the nonfiction People Different From The Students write for People Like The Writers. I know I’ve found Wole Soyinka hard to follow; I’ve enjoyed Salman Rushdie partly because I had special help with his cultural references; I think people who have trouble following Gandhi, Thoreau, or Wendell Berry probably don’t need to be in college, but many of the young have been very poorly prepared... I also know that very few college students find V.S. Naipaul or Anne Morrow Lindbergh, for two, hard to follow; students my age liked Andrei Codrescu and Salman Rushdie, and I’d guess that the young still do; I’d expect most students to enjoy Alfian bin Sa’at’s Malay Sketches. (Not only is Dorothy Sayers still remarkably readable, but I suspect she would have agreed with my point here.) It’s not as if you had to get into studies of doctrinal controversies within minority religious groups and appreciate, e.g., Hyveth Williams' Seventh-Day Adventist apologetics, to find good writing in English by people who are neither White nor male. And actually, if the purpose of a collection is to illustrate good writing techniques, how much difference should it make if the writers were White and male? Francis Bacon and John Bunyan wrote some essays that illustrate good writing techniques better than some of the uninspired recent examples in this collection…

End of rant. Because I’m turned off by the p.c.-ism in this book a person might imagine that I didn’t enjoy reading it. I did, actually. Several of the better essays in this ; collection were old favorites. Some of the ones that were new to me, I enjoyed. It’s just that I’ve read so many essays that were better than…well, let’s pick on Lewis Sawaquat’s contribution to The Prose Reader. It was new to me. It’s not a bad personal essay. I enjoyed reading it. Only when I went back to write this review did I find myself thinking “…and what is this me-me-me-and-my-demographic thing doing in the place where a hard-hitting ecological study by Marilou Awiakta ought to be?”

If you are a serious student or teacher of nonfiction writing, what this book has to offer that A Rhetoric of Argument, the Norton Anthologies, and the Best American Essays haven’t done better is the analyses of writing techniques. You probably know that personal essays are generally rated lower than the impersonal kind. You probably don’t care; personal essays tend to be fun reads. If a step- by-step analysis of how a personal essay is put together works for you, get this book. I would not recommend that teachers use it as the primary textbook all students are required to buy. I’d recommend that teachers keep it in the library for all students to read.

Oh, wottha...I'm known for brutal honesty, so I'll say it outright. You want to compile a really inclusive anthology of writing from different demographic groups, you have to read a lot of different writings, not just Google "essays by X kind of writers." I don't think the Flachmanns did their homework before they published this book.

Today's music link: Comes highly recommended by young correspondents. It is the duty of the old to try to keep up with the major trends in pop culture, although we're probably not meant to get into them. I can't say this song converted me to fanatic fandom but I do think the young singer has a good voice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMeVxTPmTDY .

E-Book Review: The Gospel in Dostoyevsky

Title: The Gospel in Dostoyevsky 

Authors: Fyodor Maximovich Dostoyevsky, J.I. Packer, Malcolm Muggeridge, Ernest Gordon

Date: 2011

Publisher: Plough

Length: 214 pages

Quote: "The true content and context of Dostoyevsky’s great works is man’s struggle to find God, in the face of every imaginable temptation to deny Him."

It has been said, and said by Russians, that the Russian church has emphasized ceremony and neglected individual spirituality. This is one of the errors into which churches can easily fall; but then we must consider the testimony of Fyodor M. Dostoyevsky. He certainly thought a great deal about individual spirituality. His characters are characterized, even defined, by their spirituality or lack of it. Their spirituality is radical, defining their personalities and determining their actions. They are good Christians, or good people who are not yet Christians, or bad people as both a cause and an effect of their not being Christians. Their faith often leads them to do things that were probably more controversial then than they are now; they talk respectfully with sex workers and worry about the plight of abused children, and The Idiot is, of course, an intelligent man who is seen as an idiot because he ignores worldly wisdom and does what he believes Jesus would have done.

Though Dostoyevsky's novels have plots, Muggeridge's claim to have read them "like a thriller" is--not exactly suspect, so much as a reminder of what an unusual student Muggeridge must have been. In Dostoyevsky what catches people's attention, what is anthologized, and what is commented on, are the long speeches in which characters express Dostoyevsky's philosophical and religious ideas. Such passages may be considered flaws in the modern novel but Dostoyevsky's fans seem to read the stories, such as they are, for those long digressive speeches.

This book is a compilation of the scenes in Dostoyevsky's novels where the Christian characters expound their beliefs at length. They are not orthodox, though their denomination is presumably Eastern Orthodox. They express ideas like "What Jesus meant by Hell must be the inability to love" and "I'd be frightened to meet a truly godless man...What I have met were restless men." 

If you already have Dostoyevsky's major novels, the short commentaries by Packer, Muggeridge, and Gordon will add only a little to your library. If you've avoided the novels because they are so long, this book contains all the passages that are most often quoted, in their context, and may interest you enough that you'll want to read the novels after all. 

Book Review: Of Other Worlds

Title: Of Other Worlds

Author: C.S. Lewis

Date:

Publisher:

ISBN: none

Length:

Quote:

C.S. Lewis didn't write a great number of short stories, nor did he write a great number of essays about short stories. He did not anticipate this collection being printed. His secretary packed up what was left, unpublished, after his death, and rushed it into print.

That's obvious as you read this slim collection of the stories and essays-about-stories that he did write. Two of the essays and one of the stories are unfinished; three or four of them make the same points in almost identical words; three cite one source. And if Lewis had anticipated his four good independent short stories printed together, one after another, I'm sure he would have Done Something About the way they seem to make a point that Lewis did not try, or admit intending, to make.

I think Of Other Worlds does appeal, and should appeal, to serious fans, collectors, and students of Lewis, and/or science fiction, and/or Christian fiction. I doubt that it ever was or will be anybody's favorite of Lewis's books. If you can't afford a complete collection, this is probably the volume you can most easily get along without. I've read it more than once and enjoyed it, but not in the way I enjoyed The Screwtape Letters or The Allegory of Love.

What is to be liked in Of Other Worlds, given that it's not nearly as solid as any of the books Lewis finished, nor the collections of short articles he intended to put together into books?

1. First there is, pre-Bettelheim, a spirited, ringing, and soundly logical defense of imaginative fiction. Lewis read stories about our world as it is, whether presented as factual or as fictional, and liked them, and quoted them, and taught them to students. He wrote stories about any kind of world except our "real" one. He didn't think much of his narrative exercise, the diary printed as All My Road Before Me after the lives of the people mentioned in it had ended. He did better with the future world he knew wasn't going to be the real future in his Space Trilogy, the past he knew wasn't real in Till We Have Faces, and the alternative dimensions in The Screwtape Letters and Narnia. Because he was unable to gratify his emotional "needs" in the real world and was retreating into fantasy to compensate? What needs, the well paid, securely employed, world-famous, and more or less happily married, professor might have asked, did the psychological school of literary criticism imagine those to be? He began with unusual, interesting dream images and let his beliefs about the real world guide those images to say things about the real world. Most of what was being written about fiction and "creativity" in the early twentieth century was so discouraging and (thank Heaven) so wrong that in the 1960s even Of Other Worlds must have come to some people like rain in a killing drought. Lewis felt the need to make the same points about speculative fiction to several different audiences. If they become repetitious in a single book, that is because they were points that badly needed to be made.

2. There's a memorable discussion of science fiction with Kingsley Amis and Brian Aldiss, produced by tape recording rather than writing. Although the sound of these three voices together was undoubtedly a treat for millions of fans around the world, none of the three is really at his best. Whisky is mentioned several times in the discussion and, although the three writers don't get drunk, they do seem to lose the thread of whatever they might have planned to say for publication. The jokes they exchange at the end may conceivably have been fresh and funny in the 1950s, and may even have been retired for so long by my generation that they might seem fresh and funny to the young. Of such jokes, surely, Lewis was thinking when he wrote about "some pretext in the way of Jokes" being dragged into conversations where the real cause of smiling and laughter is the pleasure people take in being together.

3. And then there are Lewis's four short speculative-fiction stories.

Lewis was not, in fact, a woman-hater, nor was he more of a sexist than most men of his generation; in some ways he was less of one. He was a shy, "neurotic," unattractive man who married late, but apparently quite happily. More than most of his contemporaries he denounced the "femi-ninny-ty" that became fashionable in the early twentieth century, where women apparently got away with all kinds of things by appealing to the sexist stereotype that it was "feminine" to be scatterbrained and vaguely mannish to be logical, reasonable, or right. To the careful reader his few comments on the fate of Susan in the Narnia books, on the way real women scholars encourage poor Jane in That Hideous Strength to "have no more dreams. Have children instead," and on the young lady in "The Shoddy Lands," are rather clearly and carefully saying something more like, "Girls, please don't play dumb and fashionable if your goal is to impress men--that act does not impress this man!" rather than "I don'tlike young women." For a man who grew up in a period that frowned on any opportunity for writers to observe more than a few individuals of the opposite sex, Lewis managed to delineate several types of women he found likable and attractive, and several types he didn't.

This being the case, it's unfortunate that in the four short stories we find:

1. The image of the "world" in Peggy's shallow, narrow, self-centered mind, in "The Shoddy Lands," intended as a warning to writers of all kinds but using a female fashion victim as bad example;

2. The self-selection for undesirable women, in "Ministering Angels," where just one young astronaut briefly imagines that sharing interplanetary travel with prostitutes might be fun until he gets a look at the two hopeless cases the older astronauts could have warned him they'd get. One is a gender-confused "crank" who appeals somewhat to a "gay" astronaut, but frustrates even him by preaching that sex should be as "separate from pleasure" as "any other injection." The other is a broken-down, diseased, old drunk nobody wants to touch. For of course no prostitute with a viable career on Earth would volunteer to ply her trade on Mars...

3. The painful metaphor in "Unimagined Things" where rejection by a real woman "turns a man to stone" and sends him to the moon, where he meets a Gorgon.

4. And then there's "After Ten Years," the never finished short story that seems likely to have grown into a long story, about Menelaus and Helen of Troy. Lewis was fascinated by the Greek and Roman writers who hint that Helen was desired for her beauty and pedigree alone, that her personality and character were somewhere between tiresome and horrible. She was supposed to have been half human and half swan; swans are not the most lovable birds.

Here is no shimmering alien image of what femininity might mean if separated from womanhood, as in Perelandra; none of the wiser women, scholars or just old wives, as in That Hideous Strength; none of the smart, lovable girls--Lucy, Jill, Polly, even Susan when she was being Lucy's big sister rather than a debutante--from Narnia; none of the "ugly," "mannish," profoundly sister-lovable femininity of Orual in Till We Have Faces, surely among the best female characters ever written by a male author; none of the praiseworthy types of women briefly discussed in the poems and religious writings, and certainly nothing like the favorite cousin Lewis always wished his "gay" friend would fall in love with, who haunts, if she doesn't stalk, the autobiographical writings. Here are none, in short, of the kinds of women Lewis did respect and admire.

Here is the kind of thing that happens to writers. You write a short study about one kind of person you find obnoxious or ridiculous, another, and another, and then if you allow these pieces to be published someone exclaims "You just don't like that kind of person...'women' or 'men' or 'old people' or 'young people' or..." In fact you do like some of that kind of people very much. If you notice and correct for this in time, you and perhaps your readers are in for a treat as you set out to write about a son, daughter, parent, lover, or friend whom your other characters might love, who is recognizably not your own, not even your own as you want him or her to be. Lewis, not having planned to publish his short stories together, unfortunately had not written a short story with a nice female character in it, and the result...Peggy, the Thin Crank, the Fat Drunk, the Gorgon, and Helen of Troy. Oy.

I think even Walter Hooper would have thought better of publishing that if he had thought longer. He tried later to bind the same unsatisfactory collection of stories together with a draft for a novel Lewis himself had discarded as unsalvageable, with even more dismal results.

If you've read enough of Lewis's books to read the four short stories, together, as making the statement "Short stories are not exactly this writer's metier" rather than any combined statement about people, the three finished ones are satisfactory short stories. All aspiring writers should, perhaps especially, profit from "The Shoddy Lands."

So...perhaps Of Other Worlds shouldn't even have been published in the form it was, but it's been published, and, now that it is...I've never felt sorry that I bought a copy. I'm sorry, if anything, that Lewis didn't live longer and write more short stories or essays about short stories.

Which Planet Are You Under?

As a comment on https://www.plough.com/en/topics/culture/literature/the-last-battle-revisited , I find it interesting to think, or try to think, of how much of medieval thought Galileo's astronomy upset. A crucial part of medieval education was learning the names of the visible stars and planets. Stars were used as reference points for navigation, so knowing what little was known about them had its practical benefit. They were also believed to have ruling spirits, the gods Pagans worshipped and medieval Christians merely respected as something more like angels. The planets were characterized as what seemed to be stages in life. If you read or translate medieval literature you find constant references to the archetypes associated with the planets. The medieval writers could not say how the planets related to these archetypes because, as we see things, they don't; but neither could they break the habit of referring to the archetypes they saw everywhere in life.

Earth was not seen as a planet in medieval cosmology. Earth was the center and foundation. Earth was "Mother" and "matter"; these words were connected, which was how sediment in wine came to be called "mother" and dead human flesh "mummy." Medieval thinkers could not deny the importance of "mundane" work, often "earth work" (gardening and farming), for survival, but they were always trying to get beyond it, as growing children try to move beyond the family nest. Earth was the starting point on the journey to maturity, death, and resurrection.

Earth's Sun and Moon, however, were regarded as planets. "Brother" Sun was "the great light" of education and enlightenment. "Sister" Moon was "the lesser light" of solitary reflection. Too much of either one was dangerous. Everyone knew about the effects of sunburn and sleep deprivation. 

Mercury, the smallest and fastest moving planet, seems to have represented the youth or apprentice stage of life. As a Pagan god Mercurius was the errand boy to the others, not imagined to have much power of his own. Though definitely male (a "herm" was a pillar perceived as a male symbol; Hermes was the Greek name for Mercurius) he was not usually seen as having a wife or children. Impatience, restlessness, and quick changes of mood associated with attention deficits, were "mercurial" qualities. The physical substance called mercury fascinated medieval thinkers even after they learned how toxic it is. 

Venus represented the young adult, emotional, hormone-ridden stage. As a goddess Venus had her cult, but it was considered unimportant except to people unfortunate enough to be "in love" with someone to whom their parents had not betrothed them. Venus was said to rule over all experiences of Love and Beauty but when people referred to "the act of Venus" they were not talking about the appreciation of music or landscapes. (Hunting, however, was considered similar enough to courtship that several medieval words for hunting were derived from "Venus." Deer meat is still called venison.) 

Mars, the god of war, may have been actually worshipped by soldiers. As a planetary archetype he represented the military or military-style discipline recommended to counteract the sentimentality associated with Venus. Many conflicting stories about Mars' and Venus' relationship to each other were metaphoric ways to describe the relationship between marital and martial obligations in a young man's life. The predominant story about Mars as a mythological person was that he was married, at least for a while, and had two horrid sons whose names meant Fear and Terror.

Jupiter, the king said to rule the biggest planet, represented the successful mature man. In the Greek and Roman world he was the god most often worshipped, with sacrifices of animas whose meat was then sold in the markets. Early Christians, whose failure to buy edible animals for sacrifice to this god was seen as tax evasion, disagreed about the morality of eating this "meat that had been offered to idols" because buying it gave more money to the cult of Jupiter. Ancient writers spelled and pronounced his name in several ways that all seem to have meant "God (Zeus) Father." Many stories were told about him and, though they show him to have been a bully, cheater, traitor, murderer, rapist, adulterer, and even patricide if read literally, they seem to have been metaphors that confused the spread of imperial power with the observed facts of life. In stories where Zeus killed one or both of his parents, or killed one to protect or avenge the other, his father's name was Time; Zeus "killed" mortality by being immortal. In stories where he forgot all about his wife and pursued other women, there seem to have been historical references to his cult spreading through colonies where people had previously worshipped ancestor goddesses. So the early Christians were inconsistent, even individually confused, about whether they could approve of some aspects of the Jupiter cult as showing a primitive understanding of the One God--the name form "Jove" surely reflected some attempt to associate Jupiter with the Hebrew name for God. When Jupiter was explained as the angel ruling the giant planet, his "influence" was thought to explain the "jovial" mood produced by good health and prosperity. 

(The adjective "jovial" doesn't look or sound much like the name Jupiter in English, but in the ancient world the names Jove, Zeus, theos, deus, divus, deva, and Jehovah, were "cognates"--different dialectal words that all basically meant "God." "Jupiter" was understood to be a contracted form of any of those names for God plus pater, "the Father." In Greek and Roman mythology neither Zeus nor Jupiter was seen as the One God, but as local gods who had fought their way to a dominant position among other local gods. Nevertheless their worshippers sometimes praised and prayed to Zeus or Jupiter as if they thought those gods were something like what we understand the word "God" to mean. The Hebrew idea of One God, Ruler of the Universe, had more influence on other ancient cultures than non-Hebrew writers cared to admit.)

Saturn, the most remote planet the medieval astrologers could see, was a complex character in ancient lore. His complexity seems basically to represent old age, and also the historical fact that he was actually worshipped in rural Italy before the Jupiter cult spread out from Rome. He was seen primarily as the god of good harvests and satisfaction, but he was the Grim Reaper as well as the merry reaper, presiding over poor harvests as well as good ones. A "saturnine" personality is not necessarily unhealthy, but is older, calmer, sometimes wiser than a "jovial" personality, soberer, on more familiar terms with harsh reality. The jovial archetype is cheerful in the way people can "party hearty" and forget that they're going to grow old and die, or even to have to pay the bills, later. The saturnine archetype has thought about the bills, probably paid in advance, and can now enjoy as much of a part ad the person can afford. Old age is obviously a time of misery for some people and of mature, productive joy for other people. Saturn's influence was seen as evil, even fatal, for some people and desirable for others. Mars was the planet properly blamed for war, but Saturn could be blamed for damage to the land and economic depressions that came after war--or thanked for peace and prosperity. Though the god of an Italian cult was not directly related to the Greek god or personification of Time, Chronos, Saturn was sometimes thought to represent the same archetype as Chronos. Chronos was the father Zeus had killed, though of course he didn't stay dead; he doesn't seem to have been worshipped, but he was seen as immortal and, of course, very much a power of influence on mortals.

Two physical types are observed in European populations. The basic human type that seems to be the majority everywhere is smaller and darker than what might be called the extreme White type. Medieval thinkers associated tall, muscular, big-boned, sometimes even fat, pale-skinned or even florid, fair-haired, and blue-eyed genotypes with Jupiter, and shorter, darker-complexioned types with Saturn, possibly because those differences were observed between the imperial family and the rural peasants who still worshipped Saturn. The contrast between the types is found in the Bible, where already the types were not seen as distinct "races" but as differences observed between brothers. In the Bible Jacob was definitely preferred to Esau. In Roman and medieval thought the extreme White type was seen as preferable in every way. Writers raved about characters' blond hair; if the characters were real people who had black hair, writers tactfully didn't mention it. (Satirists and political enemies, however, taunted people like Anne Boleyn about their non-blondeness.) But it remained for nineteenth and early twentieth century sociologists to identify the different types as "Nordic" and Southern European "race" types and, ultimately, decide that the "Nordic" or "Germanic" type ought to take over all of Europe. Medieval thinking about the influences of the passing planets, all crossing and interacting with one another, blamed unwanted traits on people's horoscopes and gave people credit for their voluntary behavior.  If you were blond you had been blessed by Jupiter at birth; if dark you had missed out on that blessing, but other blessings and benefits might still come to you.

C.S. Lewis, who made his literary reputation as a medieval scholar before he presumed to write Christian books, was an interesting study of the interplay of the Jupiter and Saturn archetypes. By the time he wrote the Narnia books he was old enough to be considered saturnine. The introvert temperament of which he wrote so well, the taste for remote and wintry landscapes and solitary reading, are saturnine qualities. He does seem to have had fair hair in youth, but it darkened; he was not blond. If he lamented the Saturnian hard times in which he lived, he also attracted some fans by having apparently been born somewhat saturnine, in a good way.

Nevertheless he was successful enough, because of his Christian books and radio broadcasts as well as his teaching medieval and Renaissance literature, that during years of economic hardship he took it as his Christian duty to be jovial. He didn't write about having more money and food than other people and feeling obligated to share what he had; other people agree that in fact he did give and share generously. In Narnia, a mostly peaceable place, he described the duty of the king as being "to laugh louder over a scantier meal than any man in Narnia." Though Jupiter's influence was supposed to bring wealth, the idea of revelling over a scanty meal must surely be considered jovial. It surprises some readers, who are attracted to Lewis's expression and celebration of Highly Sensory Perceptive introversion, that in real life Lewis was neither ascetic nor monastic. He wrote of his distaste for extroverts' chatter, but when he had food to share and they didn't have enough, personal taste made no difference; they had to be invited to dinner. In fact, when legal drugs were still available and encouraged as short-term substitutes for food, Lewis used coffee, tea, wine, beer, and cigars liberally. He shared those, too. Dinner with him would not have been the sort of strictly intellectual feast some of his health-conscious posthumous fans might prefer, nor would it have been an extravagant "Roman feast." Joviality is the quality that would have made it a feast, anyway.

Some references:

The Oxford English Dictionary--you could, and I once did, get material for an A+ undergraduate paper from the O.E.D. alone.

C.S. Lewis's Allegory of Love and English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama.

Robert Graves' Greek Myths and White Goddess.

Barbara Walker's Women's Encyclopedia of Myths & Secrets.

And of course any medieval literature you find. I buy, read, and sell medieval literature when I find it.

Book Review: The Penguin Book of Women's Humor

Happy Friday the Thirteenth, Gentle Readers...



A Fair Trade Book 

Title: The Penguin Book of Women’s Humor

Editor: Regina Barreca

Editor's web page: http://ginabarreca.com/

Date: 1996

Publisher: Penguin

ISBN: 0-14-017-294-7

Length: 649 pages of text, 7 pages of credits

Quote: “It must be built not of carved stone and stained glass, but of some cheap, easily combustible material which does not hoard dust and per­petrate traditions. Do not have chapels. Do not have museums and libraries with chained books and first editions under glass cases.Let the pictures and the books be new and always changing. Let it be decorated afresh by each generation with their own hands cheaply. The work of the living is cheap; often they will give it for the sake of being allowed to do it.”

This little burst of temper (by Virginia Woolf in Three Guineas) seems to have been taken seriously in too many schools and libraries today, and is the main reason why The Penguin Book of Women’s Humor is out of print. When Thomas Jefferson proposed that laws and cultural traditions should be subject to reevaluation and possible rejection by each generation, he presupposed that responsible citizens—by whom he meant educated people—would understand the value of history. So, in her saner moments, did Virginia Woolf; this little scream of rancor must be considered an early symptom of the frenzied swirl of “negative emotions,” incapable of rational thought, that would later drive her to drown herself.

Tragically, like other obvious symptoms of psychosis such as self-mutilation, delusions of “hearing voices,” and identifying with famous people living or dead in more than a whimsical or metaphoric way, the urge to purge is commonplace enough to form whole communities of sick, angry, violent people. Barreca identified Woolf’s screech as humor, which it may have been. 

Barreca knows (as did Woolf, when she was closer to a normal state of mind) that useful social changes, like the idea that women deserved equal pay for equal work, are made by preserving and carefully studying history, and even statistics. Violent upheavals, urges toward purges, are characteristic of sick and dying creatures—including sick or dying civilizations. Before the urge to gut libraries and curricula, to replace studies of historic documents with “studies” of celebrity gossip, had really become conspicuous, perhaps people could agree that it was so preposterous as to be funny.

But that’s only one paragraph among 649 pages of every kind of comic and satiric writing, most of which has never been taken seriously and so remains hilarious.

The mood of the 1990s, as well as Barreca’s personal political bias, becomes obvious after one has read all the way through this book a few times. Each individual selection is funny, to men as well as women. In the belief that he was using listening and muscle relaxation to keep stubborn hypertension from turning into cardiovascular disease, my husband had me read most of this book aloud to him, a few pages at a time. It didn’t keep his hypertension from finally becoming recognizable as multiple myeloma, and he said a few of the one-liners sounded more peevish than funny, but by and large he enjoyed The Penguin Book of Women’s Humor. It takes a good long time to have drained enough of the laughter-producing (and therapeutic) value out of this book that you notice a bias.

Nevertheless, some bias does appear after you’ve stopped laughing and begun analyzing. Barreca was part of the twentieth century’s left-wing feminist movement. Penguin’s assignment would have required her to pick the pearls out of the historic books by women to which Penguin, the paperback reprinter, had acquired rights; this means that some “conservative” and “domestic” women writers, e.g. Jean Kerr and Phyllis McGinley, are included. Contemporary women writers whose work was still being sold by its first publishers, e.g. Sue Townsend, aren’t included, and women of the recent past whose work has been kept alive by its first publishers, e.g. Laura Ingalls Wilder, aren’t included, regardless of their political orientation. If you were looking for one of Ayn Rand’s satirical barbs, or a funny story from Kathleen Norris’s then bestselling books, or Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s contemporary observations of the time in which Jubilee is set, or Bailey White’s NPR performances, or even any reflection of the most recent books by the authors Barreca appreciates most, keep looking; those books were not available to Penguin.

But, although you might have laughed more often and more heartily over McGinley’s essays than you did over Linda Stasi’s, Barreca still gives you page after page by Stasi and only one poem by McGinley; several variations on a theme Fay Weldon used best—“She set herself against [oppressive traditional notions of] God”—and no mention of Madeleine L’Engle’s “Had Mary been filled with reason / There’d have been no room for the Child.” Virginia Woolf, who appealed most to “revolutionary” or “Jacobin” readers when she voiced their form of insanity, strikes Barreca as funny; P.L. Travers or Dinah Maria Mulock-Craik, whose essays for adults must surely have been available to Penguin, do not. Mary Daly strikes Barreca as funny; Teresa Bloomingdale does not. And so on.

This does not mean that people who weren’t on the left wing in the twentieth century won’t enjoy this book; it just means that, whether or not you had any political opinion in the twentieth century, or were even able to read in the twentieth century, this book leaves a lot of funny writing by women still waiting for you.

To buy it here, send $5 per book, $5 per package, and $1 per online payment to the address at the very bottom of the screen. (Yes, Saloli is the "Message Squirrel" that routes legitimate requests for merchandise to the appropriate, Paypal-linked address.) If you want two copies or want to add a book to the package with this one, send $15 or $16. The Penguin Book of Women's Humor is fat enough (although appropriately light) that only two books of this size will fit into a package, but you could add more than one book if the others are small and thin. For any and all Fair Trade Books in the package, we'll send $1, or 10% of the cost of the book plus shipping charge, to the author(s) or a charity(ies) of her (or their) choice(s).